A wireless gateway manages various networks and devices, including the development and maintenance of customized forms applications, to make them practicably accessible to a subscribing wireless device, as well as making available network content such as images, video and audio files from content sources such as the Internet, an intranet, search engine services, etc. Wireless gateways attempt also to make the process as seamless as possible for a wireless subscriber so that the available set of resources are readily retrievable by the wireless device. In some wireless gateways, specific subjects are even associated with network resources, sites, pages, devices, images, video/audio files, etc. to facilitate retrieval. An example of this type of “friendly” wireless gateway would be a “WAP Gateway” which supports the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), and which runs on Windows NT and other server platforms. The WAP Gateway is designed to interoperate with existing and future mobile systems to provide a wide-range of services.
In an effort to make like topical information more accessible, a new navigational linkage and association system on the World Wide Web (“Web”) called “WebRings” has become favored. A WebRing is a set of linked Internet Web sites, enabled by a sign-up or opt-in procedure, that is usually topic specific and overseen by an administer called a “ringmaster.” The ringmaster usually uses a common gateway interface to administer the WebRing and to facilitate one WebRing being linked to other WebRings to create vertical communities. WebRings are loosely defined as a group of affiliated address sites, since they typically are topic associated. Other methods of associating a group of Web sites, whether by a common topic or other basis, are in essence simply a set of affiliated Internet addresses.
A major drawback in wireless gateways is their inability to provide cross-topic searching within WebRing sites, or to provide a navigation system across network addresses for efficiently accessing different file-types, recently updated site content, and new WebRing participants. Another major drawback of wireless gateways is their inability to allow previews of content within a particular topic or previews of search results when searching within a WebRing through a dynamic navigation device. Although there is virtually no category that will not be accepted for WebRings, it is still not simple to navigate between sites, despite the claims of WebRing companies, such as Yahoo™, principally because of the single membership event that lacks follow-on updating information events, a lack of indexing within a given WebRing, and also due to the rapid size and growth rate of the Internet WebRings themselves.
In the past, searching particular WebRing organizations or combinations of affiliated Internet addresses, sometimes referred to as meta-organizations, posed problems. In particular, the length of the databases to affiliate new Internet address sites in a selected WebRing was unwieldy. Presently 80,000 rings and nearly 500,000 Internet sites are tied together for some WebRing categories. The main drawback of using standard methods to select affiliated Internet addresses into a wireless network is the apparent large number of site address “selectors” (e.g. a named hyper-link to a retrieved site) that cannot be readily handled without sophisticated computer methods. As an example, for an average affiliating Internet address of 20 site address selectors on 8 different ranking methods, the number of unique rank orders is more than a billion billion (˜1018). This high variability of possible affiliating of Internet address data precludes using anything but a crude rule of thumb process to classify Internet addresses that do not satisfy a subscriber's true search objectives.
With today's new network speeds and access speeds, the problems have shifted to be predominantly organization and navigation related. But, with broad-band Internet access and other telecommunications options, wireless device access (e.g. a network terminal) holds considerable commercial promise for performing affiliated Internet site navigation and for supplying subscribers a desirable site address, even before actually performing topic or category searches.
Previous attempts to provide wireless search information can be summarized as relying on non-quantitative rules of thumb to produce qualitatively ranked search results. No current method exists to give a wireless apparatus the capability for holding affiliated Internet addresses in local storage for retrieval or for producing search results based on affiliated Internet addresses in a wireless gateway database. The principal failure of previous attempts to correlate site address data with a subscriber's information needs has centered on complex coupling patterns which determine affiliated Internet addresses in a “failure” mode. No prior pattern classification system has properly identified a set of factors that select site addresses, nor has any combination of factors been placed on affiliated wireless apparatuses.
The commercialization potential for a practical affiliating Internet address system for wireless gateways is more significant since the organizers for the wireless network are regularly content definers in complex addresses affiliating environments, including ever increasing customer needs. For example, complications can include low to high rankings for affiliated address storage and retrieval, incomplete coverage of a topic area, advanced address data formation, irrelevant content, and new file-types on a heterogeneous network. In cases in which considerable personnel time and customer money has been committed to established an address storage and retrieval topology and static mechanisms for affiliated address selection, the early detection of problems in affiliating addresses before costs are committed is commercially attractive.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and process for calculating search computational reliability for wireless systems that could superimpose objective rankings on affiliating Internet addresses into search data and thereby offer a method for evaluating navigation viability and computational resource overhead costs prior to undertaking further navigation refinements.